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Jazz Bistro opening and Massey Hall upgrade bode well for Victoria St. in Toronto

Sybil Walker of Jazz Bistro expects condo boom to help club in old Top O’ The Senator building

Although her previous employer, Top O' The Senator, folded eight years ago, Sybil Walker expects a condo boom to bring customers to her new haunt, Jazz Bistro on Victoria St. (COLIN MCCONNELL / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo

Cool music and glamorous decor have returned to Victoria St. with the opening of Jazz Bistro next door to that historic diner The Senator, near the corner of Dundas St E. Playing a lead role in this resurrection is Sybil Walker, who presided from 1990 to 2005 at the gem known as Top O’ the Senator.

Down the street, near the corner of Victoria and Shuter, another cultural miracle is about to begin: the upgrading of Massey Hall. Last month, despite ignoring other requests for arts funding, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty set aside $8 million for the first phase of this project in response to a pitch from Charles Cutts (CEO of the Corporation of Massey Hall and Roy Thomson Hall).

The upshot: Victoria St., which also boasts two historic theatres (the Elgin and the Ed Mirvish) gains clout as Toronto’s second most lively entertainment district.

We can thank a condo boom for making this an area where culture thrives.

I asked Walker what caused the demise of her old haunt eight years ago, where working for Bob Sniderman (owner of The Senator), she had produced many thrilling nights of music with such great performers as Diana Krall, Jackie Richardson, Julie Wilson, Trudy Desmond, Ray Brown and Benny Green. Why would she and the new owners of a building that had been vacant for eight years take the risk of opening a new jazz club on the lower levels of the same building (where the old club occupied the third level)?

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“With Top O’ The Senator our business was totally dependent on the theatre across the street,” she explained, referring to what was once the Pantages, then the Canon and now the Ed Mirvish Theatre.

After The Phantom of the Opera closed, other shows came and went, but there were many dark weeks.

“We tried to keep things afloat, but our business slowly sank,” she said.

So why would a jazz club be more viable now?

“We will have a lot of people living in condos, easy walking distance to our bistro, and they give us a target audience,” she says.

For now, Walker and her colleagues will have to put up with existing in a construction zone. But that’s also what offers the hope of future vitality.

Let us now praise that often maligned group, condo developers. Many longtime arts supporters consider the downtown condo boom a blight. But in my view, condos are the key to Toronto’s cultural growth. Think of the people who want to live in the towers adjacent to TIFF Bell Lightbox, the L Tower next to the Sony Centre or the skyscrapers David Mirvish proposes to build in collaboration with architect Frank Gehry.

And then there’s the heartening link between Massey Hall and Mod, the development company about to erect a 60-storey condo tower called Massey Tower on the east side of Yonge St. between Queen and Shuter.

Mod managed to acquire a parking lot behind its condo site. The lot also borders the back of Massey Hall. In the 1890s, Hart Massey tried to buy the lot but was unable to do so. So for 119 years, there has been no loading dock for the hall.

“Every lighting instrument, every speaker and even every grand piano has had to be brought in through the front door and then down the centre aisle,” says Cutts.

Eventually he plans to orchestrate a total restoration of Massey Hall, but that could take five years. For now, what’s urgent is phase one: excavating 27 feet below the surface of the vacant lot to create a basement space for future use.

Gary Switzer, the principal of MOD, has given Massey the rights to the space under the surface and in the air above it.

What makes it urgent to begin the big dig this fall is that Mod needs to use the lot’s ground level as a right-of-way, providing access for deliveries and the machinery involved in putting up its condo tower.

Digging down and building the foundation constitutes Phase One of a grand Massey facelift scheme. This phase has a price tag of $30 million, so even with $8 million from Ottawa, Cutts has to raise another $22 million. He will be asking the Ontario government to provide a matching $8 million.

Later, Cutts will announce a larger plan to reinvent Massey Hall. He is not ready to disclose details, but no doubt it will cost a lot more than $30 million and likely require the hall to close for at least a year.

Now, for a footnote that connects the dots. Massey Tower will rise on land where the Colonial Tavern, once our city’s most revered jazz club, once thrived. When the tower opens, occupants will be able to walk across the lot with the loading dock, on their way to take in the music programmed by Sybil Walker at Jazz Bistro.

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